Abstract
The story of Orpheus’s failed attempt to bring Eurydice back from the dead is a frequently used theme in literature and in the modern lyric in particular, and it has been the subject of sometimes excessively complex critical attention. One core of the myth, however, is the need for the living to face and to accept the fact of the death of someone close to them. Modern lyrics in different European languages—the heirs to the classical myth—make clear how Orpheus’s attempt to bring his wife back from Hades was always impossible, and that his reaction was thus a form of denial. Although many aspects of the broad Orphic complex are treated in the lyric, the poems selected demonstrate the core element of the myth, even when Eurydice is apparently given more prominence than Orpheus, the bereaved husband. It can also be related to C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed.
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